Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital company, on Tuesday announced the storage industry’s first technology demonstration of a solid-state drive that uses Serial Attached SCSI interface with 12 gigabit per second (12Gb/s) transfer speed. SAS-12Gb/s is the next performance step in the evolution of interface technology for enterprise servers and storage solutions.

One of the enterprise features of today's SAS drives is a second interface port that provides additional bandwidth to the drive. With 12Gb/s SAS on each of these ports, the drive can transmit and receive data at a rate of 12Gb/s, resulting in a total available interface bandwidth of 4.8GB/s per drive. With this speed, enterprise and cloud datacenters will be able to reduce latency by harnessing the ultra-high performance of SSDs or by improving the performance of large-scale HDD infrastructures.

HGST did not reveal any additional details about its SAS-12Gb/s solid-state drive for enterprise systems, but said that the device has passed interoperability tests with host bus adapters and expanders from both leading providers: LSI and PMC-Sierra.

“PMC’s 12Gb/s SAS protocol controllers, RAID-on-chip (RoC) controllers and expanders enable breakthrough performance and scalability for next-generation server and networked storage systems. We have been working closely with HGST on interoperability testing, and the high-performance benefits of our 12Gb/s SAS solutions, coupled with HGST’s 12Gb/s SAS drives, will enable a new generation of cutting-edge, scalable tiered storage for corporate and cloud datacenters,” said Derek Dicker, vice president of marketing for PMC’s enterprise storage division.

The demonstration of HGST's SSDs with SAS-12Gb/s interface will take place at the SCSI trade association technology showcase on May 9, 2012, in Santa Clara, California. Commercial adoption of SAS-12Gb/s will begin in 2013.

“Since the inception of SAS, LSI has delivered an industry-leading portfolio of SAS-based products. As the preferred enterprise interface of the future, 12Gb/s SAS will be essential to unleashing the full performance potential of SSD storage solutions to help datacenters and cloud environments contend with massive data growth and accelerate application performance. With our ongoing validation processes and compatibility testing with HGST, we are paving the way for a smooth industry transition and market adoption of 12Gb/s SAS solutions by 2013,” said Bill Wuertz, senior vice president and general manager of RAID storage division at LSI Corp.